The Laptops, The Tablets & Those Trusty Smartphones

Firstly, it is the start of a new decade and attitudes have to be adjusted accordingly. Those yearly resolutions might as well be accumulated and expressed in earnest through the next decade. So, with that in mind…welcome all ye who read this post.

Have you considered your attitude towards the myriad devices that play an increasingly important role in your day-to-day activities? How about your attitude to maintaining optimal performance on said devices? Don’t click off yet, you do not have to hunched over in a dark room in front of a dim-lit screen in order to know how to deal with these technologies. Simply read on for a few tips on how to handle the major device classes i.e. the laptops, the tablets and those trusty smartphones;

LAPTOPS

These do the heavy lifting for your online work or play and you want to get the best out of it with little risk so…

Just get into the habit of clearing your browser history, the memory saved from doing this positively affects the computer’s all-round performance, not a lot, but enough to keep the CPU calm. Everybody likes some calm, yes?

I can already hear; *muh passwords!!, muh amazon cart!!*…while true, the argument becomes convenience or security and truth be told, it is a spectrum so it boils down to individual preferences. Try remembering your most important passwords and have a ‘calm’ CPU or save em’ all online, enjoy the convenience and accept the performance drop, your choice.

Another tip is to avoid having multiple apps that perform the same function. You really do not need Opera, Chrome, Firefox and Edge except you test programs on multiple platforms for a living. Otherwise uninstall all except what works best for you, again, this is a preference but trust me the laptop will thank you.

TABLETS & SMARTPHONES

In this case, you can deal with your browsers the same way you would on a laptop. The difference here is that not clearing your history actually has a massive performance hit, even 3GB ram smartphones will start choking when enough tabs are open. Memory manager apps, especially on Android cells handle this well BUT, low quality versions will actually drain your battery in the name of saving memory. So be careful and install a well-reviewed version, there’s a bunch in the respective app stores.

As with software on laptops, how many photo-editing apps do you really need?…or media players. Yes, the filters all rock and VLC player is gospel but still…might as well get the basic 3 years out of the smartphone before planned obsolescence sets in.

Finally, our charging habits. Your phone does not need to be fully charged each time you plug it in. A 70%-80% charge is just as effective as a full charge with the main difference being that a max charge depletes your total battery charge-cycles. Smartphone batteries have a limited number of times that they can be fully charged and fully depleted, so limiting the number of times you fully juice your cell slightly extends its life span. A quick google search on the topic will enlighten you.

So there you have it, a few, not-so-scary tips on how to keep those devices chugging along.